Professor Luke Mackinder, based at the University of York, has been awarded a Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship worth £6 million to spend the next decade unlocking the secrets of how ocean algae capture roughly half of the world’s carbon dioxide, and attempting to recreate that process from scratch.
Faraday Discovery Fellowships are prestigious, long-term awards supporting original research, with only a handful given out each year. Mackinder’s project focuses on structures within algae called pyrenoids, which he describes as “a biological turbo-charger,” enabling algae to capture carbon with remarkable efficiency, though the mechanism isn’t yet fully understood. Using engineering biology and robotics, the project aims to build the first synthetic algal chromosome and construct artificial pyrenoids.
Mackinder said: “The true heavy lifters of the global carbon cycle are microscopic ocean algae.” He said the research could eventually lead to engineered “super-crops” that yield more food while actively stripping CO2 from the atmosphere, as well as sustainable algal factories for green biotechnology.
